Could you forgive two posts in two days? I hope so.
The rapture was supposed to happen today. By my count, this is the tenth rapture of my lifetime. This morning I scrolled down the rabbit hole of people on social media prepping their houses for the rapture that isn’t going to happen today, but which they absolutely believe is.
Do people have any idea how hard it is to get away from the environments that either try to make their enemies disappear or make themselves disappear? Anticipating the end times feels easier than leaving the groups that obsess about the end times.
You can’t take the apocalypse out of the girl though.
In the fall of 2016, on a roadtrip just weeks before the election, Nate and I listened to Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel. We loved it. When the HBO Miniseries released, though, we were fresh off two years of lockdowns and smack in the middle of a personal family nightmare. We tried to show up for each episode week after week, but it couldn’t hold us, not much could in those days. We watched through episode five and scrolled past it forevermore. Until a few weeks ago.
We finished it last Tuesday, the night before the shot heard round the world happened. It was, without exception, one of the best miniseries I’ve seen in recent years.
Ultimately, and without spoilers, Station Eleven is about what we do in the face of despair. More specifically, it is about continuing to make art in the midst of desolation. The refrain of “Survival is insufficient” is not sung or said so much as seen. The costumes of the actors playing actors are made of down coat sleeves, cardboard rolls, luxury golf gloves, beer bottle caps, and more trash. It does not make it all into treasure, despite what the cliches say, it only conveys that nothing is wasted in a world where nothing new can be produced except art, except life (episode 9 will have you in tears).
I’ve struggled the last few weeks to give any kind of language to what feels so terrible in the world. It’s something more than weariness (which is how I described it to a friend who asked) and more than exasperation (which is how Nate described it to me this morning). It’s a sense of continued alienation that feels a bit at its pinnacle (I say that, but I haven’t seen next week’s news yet…). Like, can it get worse than this?
The sense of desolation is real and I have reams of texts and emails from friends saying they feel it too. I don’t know how to make words works in moments like these, they feel far too insufficient, far too little, far too late.
I saw a clip this morning of the man who died two weeks ago today saying that Christians couldn’t be democrats and if you have a friend who voted for liberal candidates, they’re not a Christian. You should pray for them, witness to them, and treat them as unsaved and unredeemed.
It made me sad not only that he believed this, and some of my own family and many of my friends probably believe it, but that it meant most of all he probably didn’t really know any Christians who voted for democrats, that he had inoculated himself or isolated himself from those who had sound, wise, thoughtful, humble convictions rooted from scripture and the person of Jesus, and called themselves liberals or at least voted for a democrat candidate.
I texted a friend yesterday and asked, “Do you think those of us who come from really Trump/red/GOP families are processing all of this differently than those whose who come from families who are left leaning or more moderate? I mean, I guess what I’m asking is do you think those of us who are predisposed to feel “orphaned” in this political environment because of who our families are, are seeing something or experiencing something differently than those who aren’t feeling orphaned but instead feel like a part of a robust liberal environment?”
Every time someone says they feel orphaned in these times, someone else pipes up with something like, “Politics aren’t your parents anyway. You’re a CHRISTIAN. God is your Father.” (The loser is implied.)
But, I don’t know, maybe it’s just easier for some people to dissent, to speak up, to lose what little respect they think their family has for them. I don’t know. Maybe Jesus was right and we have to be willing to leave them. I don’t know. I’ve left my family before, estranged myself from whole chunks of them, still am estranged from some of them, and I just don’t think it’s easier. Maybe it’s easier. Some people say it is. But it doesn’t feel easy to me. It never has.
(Hi Mom.)
(Hi Dad.)
(I know you’re reading this. And I know it’s complicated for you too.)
I’ll never regret leaving the apocalypse of my family for the apocalypse of feeling orphaned for most of my life.
My mom loves me and I love her but it took us nearly 40 years to love each other in a way that that feels fair and kind to us both. I don’t know if I can ever love my dad or feel loved by him in a way that doesn’t require me to disappear in front of him while he comes out looking the victim. He used to cry, “I’m melting,” in a theatrical way when I was a kid, like the witch in the movie we weren’t allowed to watch. It took me a long time to learn that’s the narcissist’s greatest power, to make us believe they’re the ones who are disappearing while they abracadabra you right out of existence.
Well, I’m still here. I am. I am. I am still here.
In college the boy I loved took me over the Smokey Mountains, from Chattanooga to Asheville. I read The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane aloud to him while he drove winding mountain roads. We landed in a dive bar where the walls were red and the tapestries were many, and there we watched Karin Bergquist and Linford Detweiler croon for two hours and I knew I’d found my people. The next time I saw them sing, years later, they sang about all their favorite people: “Orphaned believers, skeptical dreamers.”
A few years ago, a friend would write a book with the same title. She and I get it. Made from the same rapture ridden cloth, the same apocalypse driven fever, the same bewilderment at the same time. You might get it too.1
It’s desolate. I’m orphaned, not literally, yes, I know. But if you can’t say out loud what feels true, how would you describe it? For me, orphaned in this context works.
It’s just a small thing but maybe it’s a big thing:
You don’t get to decide who is a Christian and who is not. Not even if they’re your kid or your parent, your best friend or your enemy. You can stand on stages in front of thousands and rail against some imaginary enemy, but you don’t get to wave your wand and make us disappear.
You don’t even get to make us think we’ve disappeared.
We’re still here.
I don’t know, maybe you’re feeling it too. Here’s some work from some others that resonated with me the past few weeks.
From : “I think a good quality of liberalism is a self-doubt about things, where you believe there should be an airing of ideas, because you believe you could be wrong about things. And even if you’re not going to agree with something totally, you might learn something from it anyway.” Link
From : “I am heartbroken that we are running away from, rather than towards, Jesus’ big beautiful vision of a unified, many-colored kingdom. Jesus did not see people and weigh their lives or worthiness through the filter of their ethnicity, skin color, or gender. With the Samaritan woman, he had a deep theological conversation about the temple and the Messiah. Jesus commended the faith of a Roman soldier, the kind of person many fellow Jews of Jesus’ time despised.” Link
From : “In this moment, Christ must be greater than our Christianity. Not just for the sake of democracy. But so that rival lords are named and resisted, so their spectacles and marvels are recognized for what they are: rogue words, illusions of security and salvation that serve cocktails of anxiety and authority.” Link
From : “There are no thoughts pious enough to eclipse the power of shalom. Prayer is not holier than justice. And so, we work. Toward wholeness. Toward honesty. Toward a future that knows being “tough on crime” means focusing more on men in private jets than the ones sleeping rough behind the Papa Johns.” Link
From and Phil Christman: “A fundamentally other way of thinking about them suddenly appeared to me as an option; a wholly different map of the world abruptly unfolded in my mind, in which—this is as close as I can get to summarizing it—each of these people was a subject that a person could love, and was capable of giving love to others, and was therefore infinitely precious and infinitely interesting. That whole economy of losers and winners, with its implied scarcity of worthiness, had disappeared. Or not disappeared but receded: it didn’t seem inevitable or fully real anymore. It seemed like a lie that needed to be undone by the constant practice of universal, constant, and unvarying love.” Link
From David French: “The bottom line is that American Christians inherit both scripture’s individual obligation to love their enemies and the national obligation to do justice. That is a high moral calling. Hatred and dehumanization are not viable moral options for us. There is no scenario in which we can cheer for or empower either one.” Link
Or, if you’ve got the bandwidth, from me: The Understory
I’m a Christian and left-leaning moderate, as are my parents. I’ve felt “orphaned” by my church of origin and unable to attend my current church. I’m weary of the current dialogue surrounding the death and legacy of the man mentioned and MAGA’s response. It hurts to be viewed as an outsider and unbeliever, when our relationships as siblings in Christ ought to supersede our political beliefs. If anything, the past ten years have made my heart incredibly tender toward non-Christians. They’re easier for me to love right now. But I want to exude the fruit of the Spirit toward all people, including Christians on the far-right who question my faith and character. So be it. Lord, help me.
Thanks for this, Lore. My (sporadic) Substack is called "Still Here" for largely the reasons you say. I share several components of the family history you've shared, so claiming to be "still here" in the faith, on earth at all, still present in my family, has required bravery. One of the ways God is calling me to be brave these days is to be honest about what make it hard to stay here and to show up in the ways I want to. Your column (not accidentally named) has been so encouraging as I tiptoe out into this calling. It's tough to be orphaned. Yet still to love. It's tough to remain soft amid the violence. It's good to be honest about it.